When Geeks Cruise

If you are on one of those huge cruising ships and,instead of middle-aged ladies sipping cocktails,you spot a bunch of T-shirt touting,nerdy looking guys hacking on their notebooks in the lounges,chances are you are witnessing a “Geek Cruise”.

Neil Baumann, of Palo Alto, California, has been organizing geek cruises since 1999 (http://www. geekcruises.com/), Neil always finds enough open source and programming celebrities to hold sessions on Linux, Perl, PHP and other topics dear to geeks. Open Source Celebs on the Med I was lucky enough to get on board the first Geek Cruise on the Mediterranean, scaring the nerds to death with my “press” badge. This was a one week trip in October, from Venice to Istanbul and back; an action-packed journey with sessions on Linux file systems, Samba, PHP, Perl, and MySQL.